


Reverend Vice

by Lilliburlero



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Henry IV - Shakespeare, Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: 14th Century, Canonical Character Death, Crossover, Food, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-19 04:06:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19349158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Crowley is glad that the fourteenth century is finally drawing to a close. Aziraphale, on the other hand, has been (mostly) enjoying it.





	Reverend Vice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



They met, as was their custom—Aziraphale held firmly to the maxim that Twice was a Tradition—on the feast of Saint Valentine. Crowley wondered if the the venue, a blowsy, slipshod tavern of dubious virtue near London Bridge, was an angelic idea of concession to demonic taste. Having reached the small private dining room, with its extraordinary spread of the most improbable parts of animals, variously soused, candied and jugged, he realised that Aziraphale just liked the food. Aziraphale liked this whole pitiful century: the clothes, the art, the music, the architecture, the _poetry_. But then, he always did: even pestilence and poll tax couldn’t put him off.

‘Hullo, angel,’ Crowley muttered in his most non-committal manner, and flopped bonelessly into a piece of furniture which was neither quite chair nor stool. This seemed to confirm something to the landlady’s satisfaction: she gave a little excited chuckle and assured them that she would be on hand to serve their every whim. Crowley glowered at her, less effectually than he might have hoped; eyeglasses were commonplace now, no longer necessarily the mark of the sort of occult scholar who might bewitch an honest goodwife. But she turned bustling tail nonetheless. 

‘Mm,’ Aziraphale acknowledged him through a mouthful, and pointed to a dish with his knife. ‘Capon in sauce madame?’ 

Crowley shook his head. 

‘Pommes dorées, then?’ Aziraphale suggested, skewering one. ‘They’re stuffed with sausage, which is the wrong way round, I can’t help feeling, but surprisingly toothsome.’ 

Crowley saw that the angel’s shoulders were sagging, his head drooped, the soft contours of his cheeks strained into unhappy hollows, his lips pressed into a thin, rosy line. He wasn’t gourmandising, he was doing that thing he did, _solacing_ himself with food—German had a word for it, but then, German would. Crowley had made sure of that himself, along with the dative case. 

‘No thanks.’ 

‘You’ll have some sherris sack, though?’ 

Crowley raised an eyebrow. ‘Here?’ 

Aziraphale raised the jug apologetically. ‘I mean, strictly according to the Plan, it’s not supposed to be introduced to England for another hundred years or so, but it’s been an absolutely _filthy_ day, and nothing else would really hit the spot.’

‘Fair enough.’ Crowley accepted a sticky gobletful. 

Disconsolately, Aziraphale dismembered the pork-stuffed baked apple. He looked up suddenly and said, ‘Did you do it?’ 

‘Not really, no,’ Crowley admitted. ‘Not—at all, in fact. But he is—he is dead. This—this freelance, I suppose you’d call him, greasy, down-at-heel sort of chap—got the idea all by himself, before I had the chance to—’ derisively, he mimed hopping onto a shoulder and whispering in an ear. ‘I just bought him a drink and listened while he talked himself into it.’ 

Aziraphale nodded. ‘At least dear Richard is out of his misery.’ 

‘Well, pending a decision by the Board, as it were. Put up quite a fight, considering. Killed two of the servants before our man got to him, but I suppose he might have had time to, you know, thingie.’ Crowley waved a dismissive hand, but the fiery, acidic bile had already surged into his throat; he spat it and his mouthful of sack into the floor-rushes, where it fizzled damply. 

Aziraphale grimaced. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up the question of repen—I mean, thingie.’ 

‘Don’t mention it, angel. By which I mean,’ Crowley lowered his spectacles and glared over them, ‘DON’T MENTION IT.’ 

Heartened at this apparent resumption of normal service, Aziraphale finished his sausage-apple, and reached for a dish containing a pallid, wobbly mound. 

Crowley was curious despite himself. ’What’s that?’ 

‘This? Mm, pud. It’s—a sort of a French thing. They call it—White Edible, I think. Try?’ He waved a spoon under Crowley’s nose. 

‘No—good to know. I think I can er, work with that.’ 

Aziraphale licked the spoon. ‘Cardamom, yum-yum. Anyway, what now?’ 

‘We—ell—’ Crowley let a big, expressive shrug become a face-framing, shimmying caper. ‘Be a pity to waste the uncanny resemblance, don’t you think? Seeing as it’s pure coincidence and all that—’ 

‘Oh no. Not again. Too _soon_. They’ll never buy it.’ 

‘Humans will buy anything, especially if there’s a royal involved. Go on, you've got to admit last time was good.’ 

‘It was all very ingenious,’ Aziraphale conceded. 

‘ _Ingenious_? It was a damn' masterpiece—the hermit’s disguise, the letters, the sightings, fortnight’s hols with the Pope—’ 

‘ _One_ of the Popes—’ 

‘The one with the best cellar. You’re just envious.’ 

Aziraphale affected to notice a spot of sauce madame on his gold and ivory doublet and dabbed at it in exasperation. ‘If you must know,’ he burst out, ‘I was quite worried about you. All those chapels, and grottoes, and stoups and holy-water wells. There could have been a very nasty accident.’ 

‘I always took precautions, angel.’ 

‘Still,' he said, barely mollified. 'I don’t think it would be very stylish to repeat the trick. And if my opinion is worth anything to you, you look much more like the great-granddad than you do—you know,’ he gulped, ‘like _him_.’ 

‘You had quite a crush, didn’t you?’ 

‘I did not! It was—we’re supposed to—angelic benevolence—guidance, all that sort of thing—well, maybe just a tiny bit. He was very handsome. Which is why, as I said,’ he added, coming as close as any angel could to bitchiness, ‘you’re much more like Edward. And before you suggest it, it wouldn’t be playing the game to miracle a closer resemblance. You’ll have to think of something else.’ 

‘But I’m so tired.’ Crowley flopped theatrically, forgetting the chair-stool had no arms, and lurched dangerously rightwards. Aziraphale grabbed his gown to haul him upright. ‘Will this wretched century ever just bloody well _end_ —’ 

The door crashed back on its hinges and a young man’s tall, rangy figure filled the frame. He was fair-haired, not bad-looking if you liked the pouty type, well- and simply dressed in a way that suggested a failed attempt at inconspicuousness rather than sober tastes, and (the two errant Principalities recognised simultaneously from long, intimate experience) at the stage of extreme drunkenness in which rolling, swaying and staggering gives way to a fearsome agility. 

‘Um—look here, I’m afraid this is a—’ Aziraphale stammered. 

‘Private party,’ Crowley interrupted. ‘Hop it.’ 

‘I say,’ said the young man mildly, ‘are you sure you should be talking to me like—like, I mean, do you know who I—’ he caught sight of his pointed shoe tips, by which he seemed suddenly mesmerised. ‘Frightfully sorry. Thought it was the—I mean, I’m looking for a girl called Doll. Not for me, I mean, she knows my friend Jack—’ 

‘Mistress Tearsheet usually takes the Pomegranate suite when she's entertaining,’ Aziraphale interjected authoritatively. ‘Along the corridor on the left. And—’ he added as the youth ducked back under the lintel, ‘for Heaven’s sake knock.’ 

Crowley felt, frankly, discombobulated. ‘I—er, didn’t know you— _do_ you? I mean, _I_ don’t mind,’ (he minded, he minded terribly) ‘but ah, don’t um,’ he pointed upwards, ‘frown on—um, fraternising, with the, ah—with the mortal souls?’ 

‘Not as much as they frown on us fraternising with you lot,’ Aziraphale said primly, ‘but in fact we just talk. Dorothy is _divinely_ funny about men.’ He made his cardamom face, which wasn’t, Crowley considered, wholly reassuring on the point. ‘Did you recognise that young fellow, by the way?’ 

Crowley shook his head. 

‘ _That_ is the Prince of Wales, Duke of Lancaster, Aquitaine and Cornwall, Earl of Chester—’ 

‘All right, all right. What’s all five of him doing here? Shouldn’t he be at—school or something? Does his mum know he’s out this late?’ 

‘Mum’s dead, and dad—well, obviously, being a _usurper_ —’ 

‘Shh— _language_. I don’t want to have to spring you out of the Tower again. Nearly called off the whole Arrangement after that.’ 

‘—being a _usurper_ ,’ Aziraphale amplified stubbornly, ‘doesn’t leave much opportunity for quality father-son time.’ 

‘So the little Prince is running wild? Slumming it a bit? Oh.’ Crowley stroked his chin. ‘Now you mention it, does seem like there might be an opening.’ 

‘Already filled, I’m afraid. By the—ah, generous person of Sir John Falstaff.’ 

‘Well, we’ve used him before, of course.’ 

‘So have we.’ 

They regarded each other over this temporary impasse. 

‘Toss you for it?’ Crowley suggested. 

Aziraphale tilted his head suspiciously, but he fished in the purse at his belt and plucked out a silver groat. He balanced it on his elegantly-manicured thumbnail, but as he contemplated what to Crowley’s eye looked like an entirely generic and symbolic bust of a king his eyes welled. ‘Oh—no, poor, poor, _poor_ Dickon.’ 

Crowley couldn’t be doing with such a morbid display of sentiment. He clasped Aziraphale’s fist, almost enjoying the tiny jolt of contrary energy. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘you can have this one, gratis and for free. It needs a glutt—a _gourmet_ to pull it off. It needs—an epicure. A white head, and s-s-s-something—’ he snatched his hand away, in case things got mawkish, and feinted at the straining buttons of the angel’s close-cut doublet, ‘—of a round belly.’ 

‘Cheeky,’ Aziraphale murmured. ‘I can’t think of anyone else in the universe I’d do it for, but you come along and ask me to play the old white-bearded Satan, and I find myself—somehow—helpless to refuse.’ 

‘Really? Well, as it happens, you made a superb start by misdirecting the young prince there. The divine Dorothy was disappointed in the Pomegranate suite tonight. Already booked by a tall stranger, dressed all in black, who _some_ thought bore a more than passing resemblance to the old—well, the _late_ king—’ Crowley stared deliberately at the ceiling, ‘ _if_ you care to join me?’

**Author's Note:**

> Richard II probably died on 14th February 1400. I've followed chronicle history and Shakespeare in suggesting he was murdered by Piers Exton, an impecunious knight hoping to curry favour with the new regime.
> 
> Some information about 14th century cuisine can be found [here](http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/book1390cury.htm).
> 
> There were some unusually plausible rumours that Edward II escaped to continental Europe after his deposition in 1327. An account and further links are [here](https://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-fieschi-letter-edward-iis-movements.html).


End file.
